A Case For Home Education
Apologetics focuses on knowing, understanding, and defending our faith. Home education allows us the greatest opportunity to teach the precepts and doctrine of the Church and optimizes our children's ability to defend and witness to their faith. Ultimately, the purpose of knowing, understanding, and defending the faith must be used for the purpose of spreading the Good News, of becoming a light for Christ set on a mountainside for all to see. To raise children strong in the faith goes beyond knowledge and understanding—they too must radiate the love of Christ.
Perhaps the best approach to make a case for home education is to refute attacks on it. I'll start with this one: "What about socialization?" Always the biggie; always the easiest to refute. Whoever asks this question presumes that we don't go outside the four walls of our home to educate our children. Certainly there is a problem with socialization: There is too much of it. How do we scale down the social time to make sure we are spending enough time on academics? The socialization we have is a non-age-segregated, high parent-to-child ratio, natural, innate kind of socialization that is born of entire families becoming friends and learning how to relate to people of all ages in one setting—elderly, adults, adolescents, children, toddlers, and babies. The setting is the family, which the Holy Father has called "the first and fundamental school of social learning." Our society grossly underestimates the value of the family providing social growth.
Home education lacks the contrived setting that lumps twenty or thirty children the same age together in one place, which I can only liken to a marathon birthday party. Though children (not all) get used to it, imagine the sensory overload that happens being in close quarters with all those age-mates during the best hours of a child's day. This is the breeding ground for the kind of childlike cruelty that we all remember well.
In a family setting, children may still be cruel (none of us are immune to that), but having parents around helps to diffuse hot tempers, teasing, and hurtful play. It is an opportunity to catechize our children in Christian behavior. When there are one or two teachers and thirty kids, much cruelty goes unnoticed and many opportunities for correction and teaching are lost.
The question about socialization presumes that whatever socialization happens in a school system is productive. This is absurd. We need only look to our own experience in school and remember that not all social contact was good. Then look to the quality of social contacts as it has evolved in the last thirty years; we see a horrendous deterioration. Split families, drugs, sexual promiscuity, hostility, and rage have increased dramatically since the 1960s when liberal license became the status quo. Consider the cost-benefit analysis. How much negative social stimulation makes it tolerable to stay in a "system" in order to receive the benefit of the good social stimulation?
My last point regarding the "What about socialization?" charge is this: Schools are to provide an education, not a social life. If I ask parents why they send their children to school, they will inevitably reply, "To get an education." Only when the topic of home education is raised do these parents defend vehemently the importance of school's social nature.
Another argument against home education is: "I can't teach my child anything. It is a constant battle of wills." If your relationship with your child is that bad, sending him away for six hours daily is not going to improve it; it just means you don't have to deal with it. We are explicitly told in Scripture and the Catechism time and again to teach our children the faith:
"Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up" (Deut. 11:18-19).
"Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord" (Eph. 6:4-7).
Similarly, the Catechism, states:
"The fecundity of conjugal love cannot be reduced solely to the procreation of children but must extend to their moral education and their spiritual formation. The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute. The right and duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable" (CCC 2221).
"Parents must regard their children as children of God and respect them as human persons. Showing themselves obedient to the will of the Father in heaven, they educate their children to fulfill God's laws" (CCC 2222).
"Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well-suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery—the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones. Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them" (CCC 2223).
Self-mastery? Self-denial? If we don't have it, how can we give it to the kids? It is obvious that our Father in heaven expects us to model Christian behavior to our children. That means getting along. If a parent is unable to take the first step toward getting along, the child likely never will. If we can't educate them in the basics of academics because we can't get along, we will never inculcate the faith as we are instructed to. Expect your children to challenge, whine, complain, push, and irritate you. God, after all, gave them free will. We can expect them to use it. Use these times as opportunities for instruction, and offer up the hardships that come with the privilege of raising children for the kingdom of God.
Home-educating parents often hear, "But how will you prepare your children for the real world?" Undeniably, our children must live in the world, but they must not be of it. Naturally, this comment assumes that school, be it private or public, somehow models the "real world" and by doing so prepares children for it. But school as we know it does not model the real world. In fact, school is an anomaly. Nowhere else in life do we experience anything that is like school. In the family, the domestic Church, we learn how to behave in the "real world," not how to live in spite of it. As Christians, our principles transcend surviving in the "real world." As Catholics, we can suffer the bitterness and cruelty that exists. We know it to be the way of merit.
It could be said of home-educated students that they may be ill-prepared for the temptations of the culture. Theoretically, by living apart from the culture, once a child gains autonomy, he may more easily succumb to the slick appeal of media, given its explicit assault on our senses and our natural tendency toward sin. In fact, sin is packaged so nicely we are suspect to call it such. How someone could even manage to avoid what the media promotes is beyond me; it is pervasive, profuse, and provocative. Most of us, being raised in "the system," have the sagacity to draw from our own experiences and to share the pitfalls and temptations that exist in our society with our young people.
While there are many reasons why home education works, two stand out in my mind. The first is that the children are not raised in a peer culture. They are raised in a family culture. A peer culture exists where the social pressures of peers are the driving force that shapes us. No one among us can deny that our school-day peers shaped our thought, our dress, the way we spoke, our ideals. No matter how solid the family, we cannot expect our children to be unscathed by the social pressures of their peers. Children succumb to it or else they are ridiculed because of it.
When I walk through a mall, I am tempted to covet all the things I see there. It is good for me to practice temperance and mortification by not giving in to the temptation to buy all the wonderful products I see: clothes, furniture, jewelry, books. Should I spend six or seven hours daily there, however, the temptation would likely be too much to bear, and I would own a great deal more than I do now (and be considerably poorer). For our children, the draw of peer culture is far too great a test to put them to for six hours daily, twelve years of their life. Certainly, they will be exposed to enough pop culture, without going to school, to learn to practice temperance.
The cult of dating is one of the results of peer pressure. Too often whom you "hang out" with is far more important than who you are. We have seen all too clearly the results of "casual" dating. We let two young people raging with hormones go out alone. Casual dating. Casual relationships. Casual sex. Casual disobedience, and casual mortal sin. These are what the cult of dating can inculcate. A casual, sunny afternoon stroll into the wide-open gates of hell, while Satan sits on the sidelines chuckling. Not even the most liberal among us would put our spouses in a situation where they were alone with another man or woman into the wee hours of the morning, baring their soul and sharing their innermost thoughts. And not because we don't trust our spouse, but because we know the temptation could be too great.
Children educated at home are not immersed in a peer culture. Therefore, the pressure to take part in the norms of a peer culture—like dating—does not exist. The norm for home-educated children is—you guessed it: the family. It is true that our children must function in the world, but we must walk through it with them, instructing them, giving them more freedom as they gain strength of character, in order to preserve their faith. Our children's education, formation, and salvation depend almost entirely upon our participation in their lives. Upon these precepts we teach our children at home, and upon this foundation we build the domestic Church.
The second reason home education works is that it produces people with strong formation because it is founded on moral truth. Quality of education can be measured only in light of moral truth. If an education program does not emphasize moral truth—or, worse, lacks it or even teaches against its existence—it isn't a good education. Truth, faith, and education cannot be separated. Children who are schooled in these circumstances typically come out of school with no faith. Sadly, there are very few schools that continue the tradition of teaching from moral truth, even Catholic schools. Faithful Catholic families recognize and live their lives on the foundation of moral truth. But if the children are constantly having this truth undermined, implicitly or explicitly, in the education programs, the very core of their faith is also undermined.
Parents educating their children at home choose the material they use in light of moral truth; it matches the truth they live their lives by and does not undermine the faith.
The purpose of home education, like apologetics, is to arm our students with knowledge of their faith that will make them leaven for the world. The ability we have to shape our children's faith, with the family as the primary social environment, is the right and the responsibility we must exercise as parents. The world is crying for this new generation of home-grown apologists.
Bonnie Landry writes from Nanoose Bay, British Columbia.
This item 1359 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
